


Check Out What She Was Reading!

by orbitaldiamonds



Series: Star Trek: Voyager Daydream Fic Snippets [1]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Episode: s02e01 The 37's, Gen, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, well sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 02:09:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7021594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orbitaldiamonds/pseuds/orbitaldiamonds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Instead of finding a 1936 Ford in "The 37s," the crew of <i>Voyager</i> finds a 1996 Oldsmobile whose description and contents are suspiciously similar to the author's circa 2005, which is when this was written. This was originally part of a large-scale daydream fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Check Out What She Was Reading!

"What is that thing?" asked Harry. "Is it an early hovercar?"

"No," Tom said, "That is a nineteen ninety six Oldsmobile."

"A what?"

"A gasoline powered automobile from the late twentieth century."

"Oh...okay."

Tom circled the vehicle. It was dirty, and was covered with dings, not just from space dust but from its former life as a mover of people in the twentieth century.

He pried open the lid of the trunk with the help of Harry, Commander Chakotay, and a laser scalpel (Tom wanted the car to be in as good a shape as possible--he wanted to fix it up in a holographic garage he was designing in his head), and to Tom's surprise (and everyone else's) there was a rather odd assortment of items in there.

There were two sets of outfits, each set on metal-and-wire hangers, each set wrapped in a plastic garment bag, there were a few books, most of which looked old even by twentieth century standards, a first-aid kit, and the rest looked like garbage.

The contents of the back seat definitely were garbage. Paper cups with plastic lids and straws, paper bags, napkins, plastic bottles with various product names written on them: Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Cherry Coke... But it would all be collected and stored in air-tight containers because when a piece of trash is found perfectly preserved after more than three hundred sixty years, it becomes a cultural artifact, like the things the cavemen threw away.

Tom and Harry each poked a head inside the front of the car. There was a fuzzy cover on the steering wheel. Knowing what to look for, Tom carefully dislodged a precious artifact--a cassette tape. "'Jimmy Buffett,'" Tom read the printing on one side, "'Floridays.' Jimmy Buffett! I've heard of this guy!" In a little crevice under the cassette tape player, there was another of these precious cassette tapes. In front of the passenger seat was a little more garbage, the same paper bags and cups as before, and on the passenger seat was a handbag, small, made of soft beige denim, and there were small metal circles, each one with a unique phrase or picture on it: "Bite Me," "Talk Nerdy to Me," a large one with tiny text that said "It's none of your business what it says," (Tom pointed that out to Harry and they had a laugh over it), one with a smiling, wide-eyed anthropomorphic yellow sponge, one with another anthropomorphic animal, this one a starfish, wearing swim trunks, and one with four young men with pale skin, dark hair, and dark makeup. Tom assumed they were musicians. When they opened the bag they found a small leather pouch with some old currency in one half and several plastic cards in the other. From these they learned that the owner of the vehicle was named Trisha Sanderson, and that she'd been born on August 17, 1983. There were also cosmetics, a couple of feminine hygiene items that neither Tom nor Harry could identify but that Captain Janeway could, and a rather thick paperback book with a green cover and large yellow letters proclaiming the author and title.  
"Captain, Harry, check out what she was reading!" Tom said.

He set the book on top of the bag. The author of the book was Diana Gabaldon. The title of the book: _Voyager_.


End file.
